The Bench They Put My Name On

The bench is oak and it is a good bench and it is in a genuinely nice spot, and that is not sarcasm, it is a fact she keeps having to state to herself.

The plaque is small and brass and it has her name and the years, and the years are the problem, because a plaque with two dates on it is a thing you put on a bench for somebody who has finished.

She has not finished. She has not even slowed down. She stepped back from one specific responsibility, in March, because it needed a person who could be there on Wednesdays and she cannot be there on Wednesdays any more, and she said so, once, in a meeting, in one sentence.

And what came back, six weeks later, was a farewell.

They did it properly, which somehow made it worse. Somebody had made a slideshow. Two people spoke and both of them used the past tense throughout, and one of them said the word tirelessly, and there was a cake with an icing image of the building on it, and at the end of it they gave her a plaque and told her about the bench.

She is sixty eight.

She said thank you and she meant it and she cried a bit at the right moment, and she went home and sat in her coat for a while, and then, at about eleven, she said out loud to an empty room: I only stopped doing Wednesdays.

That was five months ago. She has been to the bench twice. It is a lovely bench.

And the thing that has actually happened in five months is not sadness. It is that everybody has stopped asking. Not out of unkindness: they held a farewell, and after a farewell you do not ask somebody to do things, and so nobody has, and she has noticed the shape of that around her the way you notice a draft.

There is one sentence in Isaiah where God says something about old age that nobody puts on a plaque.

Even to your old age I am he

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally promises. A door will open. God has a second act for you. Your best is still ahead. I am not going to say any of it. Nobody talking to you about God has been authorized to forecast a second act, and a woman of sixty eight who is handed one will spend the next four years watching for it and grading every month against it.

Isaiah has God saying this: And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you (Isaiah 46:4).

Count the verbs about God in that one verse. I am. I will carry. I have made. I will bear. I will carry. Will deliver. Six of them, and every one of them is His, and the person being addressed does not have a single verb in the sentence.

You are being carried by somebody who has not changed His arrangement at your age. That is not me overreading; Isaiah 46:4 names old age and gray hairs specifically and answers both with carrying, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line put the whole activity on God's side.

And notice what the verse is set against. The verses before it are about idols that have to be carried around by the people who own them, loaded onto animals, a burden to the weary. The contrast is exact: their gods have to be carried, and this one carries.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

A farewell is not a verdict

Now the thing that has actually happened, because it is not the plaque.

A farewell is an event with a meaning attached, and the meaning is public and it is agreed by everybody in the room whether or not it is accurate. She said one sentence about Wednesdays and a room full of kind people converted it into a conclusion about a life, and then marked the conclusion with a cake and a bench.

And after that, nobody asks. That is not malice. It is the ordinary operation of an event that has been given a meaning.

You have never been concluded by a room. Psalm 71:9 has an old man asking not to be cast off in the time of old age, and it is a request made to God rather than to a committee; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) does not take minutes from anybody's farewell.

This is yours right now, on a bench in the last of the light: a bearing that has no scheduled end. Psalm 92:14 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, and still is the operative word; the Spirit who inspired that psalm did not build a ceremony into it.

The bench is a good bench

Let me say something about the bench, because bitterness about it would be a waste of a woman's remaining years and there is none of it in her anyway.

They meant it. The slideshow took somebody hours. Two people stood up in front of a room and said true things about her, and one of them cried, and the word tirelessly was not a lie. That happened, and it was love, and it is worth having.

And it also converted a woman into a past tense in the minds of about forty people, and both of those things are true at once, and holding both is the only honest place to stand.

You were loved in that room and you were also mistaken about. Romans 12:3 tells a person not to think of himself more highly than he ought, but to think soberly, and soberly cuts in both directions; the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter did not make sober self assessment the same thing as agreeing with a room.

Fruit is not output, and a farewell is where the difference lands. Output is the role: attendable, listable, and now over. Fruit is what has grown on a woman across forty years, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, which means nothing about the bearing changed when the responsibility did.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the walk you take past that bench anyway, tell Him one true thing about the five months with nothing asked for. Not a request for a door. One true thing. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody schedules that.